Weekend® - Macau Daily Times
Weekend® - Macau Daily Times
Weekend® - Macau Daily Times
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
18 December 2010<br />
he ultimate delicacy,<br />
arm near you?<br />
nal.<br />
“it is extremely difficult – not to say<br />
impossible – to tell the difference between<br />
a very good farmed caviar and<br />
a wild one. at the top of the range,<br />
even a specialist would have a hard<br />
time telling which is which.”<br />
Petrossian laments the fact not all<br />
caviar houses are transparent about<br />
the fact they are selling farmed eggs,<br />
however.<br />
“the customer has to know what<br />
species he is buying.”<br />
-- ‘We thought the fish<br />
was going to disappear’ --<br />
Global production of farmed caviar<br />
has soared from 500 kilogrammes<br />
(1,100 pounds) in 1998 to 150 tonnes<br />
today – even as legal sales of wild<br />
caviar dwindled from 300 tonnes to<br />
close to zero.<br />
Prices have also fallen, as expanding<br />
farms yield economies of scale, but<br />
even farmed, the delicacy remains<br />
out of range for all but the best-lined<br />
of pockets.<br />
at Petrossian, for example, 30<br />
grammes (one ounce) of the most affordable<br />
caviar – Baeri royal – will set<br />
you back 60 euros (80 dollars), while<br />
the same amount of Beluga royal,<br />
the rolls-royce of caviars, sells for<br />
by Emma Charlton<br />
228 euros.<br />
angling to seduce a younger clientele,<br />
Petrossian recently launched<br />
slightly lower priced formats like<br />
pressed caviar, caviar aperitif cubes<br />
or tiny caviar-on-the-go boxes.<br />
“But it will never be a cheap product,”<br />
he admitted.<br />
Wild sturgeon was taken under the<br />
protection of the UN Convention on<br />
international trade in Endangered<br />
species (CitEs) after a period of<br />
dangerous overfishing in the mid-<br />
1990s.<br />
“Coming out of a time when you<br />
could get 30 years in the Gulag for<br />
fishing a sturgeon, when the russian<br />
23